Tuesday, May 2, 2017
I left
I actually got up and walked out. My mother is almost 90 years old and diagnosed with stage 4 dementia. To me, she treats me the same as ever but now she treats everyone else the same way. Today when I visited her in the care center, she immediately launched into her demands to go home. I am confronted with the demanding mother I remember from my teenage years. Her threats then of suicide if she didn't get the help she wanted then. In high school, I felt like I was running a constant balancing act of school, caring for mother and watching out that my mother didn't turn on my younger siblings. They are adults now. They can take care of themselves. Mother informed me today that she only used the threat of suicide to make us let her come home. Irony, it is her threats of suicide and unreasonable demands that are keeping her in the memory center. Today, after 15 minutes, she made move to get up, I stood up and left. It was a weird relief to hear her say, after all these years, the threats were idle threats used to manipulate me. Her emotional abuse succeeded when I was a teenager. Today, I left.
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6 comments:
You're free! She finally has no power over you!
Ruth, When I finally fully realized the raging, the huge public scenes, the stormy Silent Treatments, the shameless demands, extortion of my childhood, adolescence, adulthood, that my only utility was analogous to a couch, a chair etc. was an ACT, allll a Manipulation, a forced compliance with her selfish agenda etc. the sheer enormity of what I had experienced as "her child"/possession, left me feeling deeply shaken. For a number of years, actually. That woman terrorized and terrified her own family/offspring for Power and Control as does any petty tyrant, for entertainment and ceaseless petty demands. That realization came as a result of a "last straw" event that in typical fashion was not marked by the size of the event but the sameness of it: Her behavior in the present made the past manifest repeatedly. It seems what you've just experienced is the same kind of realization?
The cost to me, other family members, the community at large etc. was incalculable. The destroyed lives and people she left in her wake by the time of her physical death was stunning in it's chronicity and severity. No one will ever succeede in dislodging my bedrock belief and experience that evil exists and it exists in and is perpetrated by human beings. I am still having "memory bubbles" as I call them decades later. These are not necessarily traumatic events but memories of events I've not thought of since the day they happened: They're my "Baseline Crazy" measurement.
I do believe it's a miracle we survived at all.
TW
Certainly feels that way.
I agree TW. Survival is a miracle. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
There was a real internal shift in my thinking and feeling at the time of that event, Ruth. The decades of anguish, of trying to manage a relationship that was inherently unmanageable ended at that time. Any unconscious reservations, any possibility that I would review my decision to terminate the relationship evaporated. I stopped arguing with myself. Some people might call what I experienced "acceptance" but I think of it as hubris-my own. I wanted a relationship with someone who did not want a relationship with me. It's not possible to have any kind of human relationship with an entity you regard as a "thing" rather than a person and with someone you doesn't even know you in any event. That woman had no clue who I was-and didn't care to either. My only function as far as she was concerned was my utility to her.
I knew I'd never go back: To do so would mean I would have to "unknow" what was Truth and betray my own conscience. The price was waaayyy too steep. I wasn't happy about it but I walked away knowing I had done all I could: She had every right to live as she saw fit.
So did I.
And so do you, Ruth.
TW
(School should be over pretty soon? What an exhausting, trying year you've had.)
Thanks TW. It is a huge change in how I am thinking. I spent so many fruitless hours trying to 'make things work' when my mother had no intention of anything being anything accept exactly how she wants it. I can't go back to what I was and she can't accept the change in me. Her choice. I accept it.
School is winding down fast. 3 more weeks and I'm done. It was a tough year and I survived it. Moving forward feels good.
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